


Oh, it Came o'er my Ear like the Sweet Sound that Breathes Upon a Bank of Violets

by ambitiousbutrubbish



Series: I Get My Kicks Above the Waistline, Sunshine [4]
Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-22 09:19:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14305593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambitiousbutrubbish/pseuds/ambitiousbutrubbish
Summary: If music truly is the food of love then Newt wants a feast, and Orsino is a damn idiot for ever suggesting you could eat too much.





	Oh, it Came o'er my Ear like the Sweet Sound that Breathes Upon a Bank of Violets

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who watched Pacific Rim again!
> 
> (I haven't actually seen the sequel yet but this is basically all before the first movie so who really cares)

When Newt first draws bow across string, the violin makes sense to him like nothing else in the world. He’s only four, and his fingers can’t move fast enough to keep up with the tune inside his head, and he can’t read the notes on the page, but it feels like his own body vibrates in unison with the instrument. It belonged to his uncle, and it’s a few hundred years older than the oldest person alive, but in Newt’s chubby little hands it grates and squeals like a violin mass produced on the cheap.

Even so, the music flows through his blood, sings in his veins, sways his entire body. 

He doesn’t start with sheet music in front of him. His mum sings for him; scales, and sweet, simple tunes that Newt does his level best to mimic. She is a good teacher; proud and attentive of a son who looks to be following in her footsteps, and Newt improves quickly. He sets his heart on grand concert halls, polished floors and seats on tiers so high he can’t even see the back row. His mum buys him silver strings with a gold E string, and Newt practices so much that the plating is worn off in a month, and she beams at him and buys a new one. All he wants is to be a musician.

And then Newt turns ten, and the librarian at his school hands him a biology book after he has made his way through everything they have on music. And everything else just kind of stops.

His mother has never forgiven him.

*******************

At eleven, Newt moves with his dad and uncle to America. Everything in Germany reminds them of his mother. Newt’s bags are stuffed to the brim with his clothes, biology books and Pokemon manga, but he carries his violin with him on the plane.

He’s tested before he starts school in a new country, and even though his English isn’t perfect by a long shot, he’s skipped forward so that he can complete his last year of high school before he goes to university. 

He’s ignored and teased and out of his depth with his peers immediately, but the _books_ are fascinating. At the end of his first week, Newt stays up for two whole days straight just reading textbooks, and his dad panics when he passes out at the breakfast table on the third. 

He cracks his glasses - which is bad, because they can’t really afford new ones - and they take him to a psychiatrist. She talks with him for an hour, and diagnoses him with _something_ , he can’t ever quite recall. All he really remembers is looking around her office while she talks about medication with his dad, and all the diagrams and scans of brains she has on the walls. It can’t be typical décor, but they focus him like only science has been able to since the first time he opened that biology book.

They can’t afford the pills he’s prescribed either. Instead, his dad makes him promise to pace himself, and Newt does his very best. He doesn’t even go to university until he’s 14.

*******************

Newt starts writing to Hermann after the first Kaiju attack. He’s possibly the best person that Newt’s ever met. He’s definitely a genius, and that is not a word that Newt uses lightly; pretty much only uses it for himself. Hermann is a mathematician, not a coder by trade, but he writes the Jaeger programs anyway. He says he would trust saving the world to literally no one but himself. Newt kind of swoons a little at how damn confident he is, which is frankly stupid. But he’s always been drawn to competence. 

Hermann sends him snippets of the Jaeger coding scribbled in the margins of his letters, as if he had the idea while he was writing. Newt likes to think that he inspired it somehow. Sometimes in his next letter, Hermann will ask for him to copy the numbers down and send them back to him. Newt works one of the sequences into the tattoo of Trespasser that he’s been designing, hidden on the edge of the shading along its crest. It’s a little pathetic. But Hermann’s brain is so beautiful, and Newt wants it on his skin, preserved forever. 

Hermann never writes anything personal, and the only thing Newt really knows about him are what he can infer - that he has at least brother and a sister, that he’s prepared to argue about anything at any given time, and that his father is stealing credit for his work. It isn’t until Newt finally convinces him to email like a normal person instead of writing that Hermann finally starts to let personal details slip. Newt loses the scribbled strings of numbers, but Hermann’s thoughts are a little less organised in type. 

Newt has not been shy with himself. He tells Hermann everything, because he wants to know everything in return. He’d tell him what he had for _breakfast_ every day, if he ever managed to remember to eat it. Instead he contents himself with writing about his research and his classes. Hermann never offers any advice for either, but he also doesn’t tell him to stop, so Newt takes it as a sign. 

There’s one student in his master’s course; a few years older than him, and she offers him tickets to a band he’s only vaguely heard of. She recognised his name as German, she tells him, and she knows of a band that he may just like. He sends her away with the sharp reminder that if she wanted to improve her grades, she would just have to study harder. The reply he gets when he relays the story to Hermann is somehow sardonic, even through the written word. “You should have taken the tickets.” He finishes with. “They’re a talented band.”

It’s the first personal thing Hermann has ever told him, and Newt is _obsessed_ : with it, with Hermann, with the knowledge that Hermann is a human person with preferences for things and maybe he just may prefer him to other people. 

Newt’s father owns a piano store, but he goes to his uncle for help. He’d done his own research and decided that a sound engineer would have more inroads into the world of his new interest than a piano tuner.

Within a month he has found a band desperate enough for a singer to let him join, despite the fact that he’s truly not very good. He buys a leather jacket, he’s not afraid of eyeliner and tight jeans, and he can speak German; so he has the look if nothing else. 

Within the year, he finishes a his doctorate in music. 

And then the second Kaiju erupts from the Breach, and Newt abandons everything else for a threat that is no longer simply theoretical.

But he keeps the jacket. 

*******************

Hermann, it turns out, has a very eclectic taste in music. Not long before the end off the first year of working together, Newt runs in late to the lab and hears something distinctly pop-y drifting out of the speakers on Hermann’s phone. He stops in his tracks, too shocked to say anything, and Hermann quickly pauses the music, nothing more than a faint blush on his cheeks to suggest that Newt hadn’t been imagining things.

Newt is a scientist, no matter what Hermann may mumble about him being a glorified fanboy, and he resolves to experiment. He turns off his alarm three times the next morning and rolls into the lab an hour late. This time Hermann’s phone is blasting something far more expected, the already tinny quality of the speakers exacerbated by the wall of sound coming from them. It’s the kind of thing his uncle would roll his eyes and wince at, and Newt loves it, the little glimpses behind Hermann’s prim and proper exterior. He doesn’t comment on it when Hermann pauses the music, but he does raise his eyebrows.

“Regrettably I have become accustomed to your yammering.” Hermann says, without a hint of apology. “I’ve found it has become quite impossible to work in silence.” 

Newt _beams_ at Hermann’s scowl.

He starts setting his alarm later to find out just how far Hermann’s musical tastes extend. He definitely seems to have a preference for anything loud and German and barely coherent, but he also appears at home with anything from the most generic Top 40s pop to sweeping orchestral numbers to what he’s pretty sure is the Shrek 2 soundtrack. He’d lingered outside the door for that one, but Mako had visited the lab after he only caught two songs and he could’t confirm.

Newt revels in it until he doesn’t, when he walks into the lab and the the bubbles of excitement in his chest burst all at once, leaving a gnawing empty space. His mother’s voice drifts across the room to him, and Newt can do nothing to disguise the way his face falls. It must be a new recording, because he hasn’t listened to it before. It’s the first time he’s heard her sing since she abandoned them. 

Hermann may not be the best at reading human emotions, but Newt imagines anyone could see the distress on his face. Hermann looks at him questioningly. “That’s my mum.” Newt manages to choke out, voice pitched high and tone far sharper than he feels. “She left when I was ten because I didn’t want to follow in her footsteps.”

Hermann looks shocked for a brief moment, and it’s nice to know that he let Newt have his personal life, although a little disheartening that he didn’t practically online-stalk him to find out all his secrets because he wanted to know _everything_ like Newt did. Then his face settles into a kind of stony fury, and he picks up his phone, fingers flicking over the screen. Newt swallows hard and settles into his work, avoids Hermann’s eyes to avoid having to talk about it at all.

Hermann never plays his mother’s music again.

He thinks he’s simply being kind, but the first time they spend the night together, Newt waits until Hermann leaves the room to shower before he starts snooping through his stuff. 

There isn’t a trace of her.

*******************

Hermann takes him out to a restaurant. Which is a little strange, because Newt always thought that he would be the one who eventually did the asking and choose the place. But then they step outside, and the sounds burst around him, and he remembers that he pretty much never leaves the lab, let alone the Shatterdome, and if it were up to him he wouldn’t know any place to pick. Yelp has not been updated much in the last few years. 

But Hermann asks him out, and Hermann chooses the restaurant. Newt’s never had much of a head for languages, but just like when he learnt English, he picked up spoken Chinese by necessity. He didn’t ever really get the hang of reading it, but he recognises the symbols over the door from news reports. He’s not sure he’s ever seen a restaurant that styled itself as Eastern European before, and it’s strange, but he supposes that expats come from and go to all over the world and bring their own cuisine. 

He stumbles a little over the doorstep when he walks inside and sees that all of the staff are Chinese. He would think that Hermann must somehow read his thoughts if he didn’t know him so well, and wasn’t sure by Hermann’s little smirk that he was expecting his exact reaction. He leans in close to whisper in his ear and Newt just about loses all ability to think. It’s been a long time since someone has come this close to him, has leaned into his personal space rather than shying away, and for it to be _Hermann_. Newt doesn’t even know what to do with that. 

“You know Sasha.” Hermann whispers, and Newt tries to conceal a gulp. “If I were more superstitious, I’d believe that this place popped out of thin air just because she wanted it so badly.” Newt nods and laughs nervously, because he doesn’t know Sasha at all, but Hermann talks about the Kaidonovskys like they’re just regular, approachable people, and not terrifyingly huge Russian superheroes. He can’t for the life of him figure out how that friendship happened; Hermann likes to frustrate him too much to ever give him an answer, and when he asked Alexis he had just stared at him for a moment before walking away. Regardless, Newt’s glad to know that someone will back Hermann up when he inevitably offends a pilot.

He follows Hermann to a table and snatches up his menu to hide his face while he tries to get himself back under control. He hasn’t been on a date or even really out to dinner since his first year teaching at MIT, but he still knows he’s being rude. Hermann doesn’t even comment on it, just waits semi-patiently and taps his own menu on the table. Newt lowers it slowly, and looks across the table at Hermann watching him. He smiles softly, and Newt copies as best he can.

“Sasha tells me that the food here is not authentic.” Hermann starts, his voice low, and Newt latches onto the sound of it, like the calm blue sea that never had a Kaiju erupt out of it. “But she also says that the vodka certainly is, if you want to try?”

“Will you?” Newt asks, because he honestly has no idea what the etiquette is here. 

“I have tried it once,” Hermann says with a far-away and not entirely fond look on his face. “And never again.” Newt tries to imagine Hermann getting steadily drunk with two giant Russians, and he doesn’t even know where to start. The idea of Hermann with a hair out of place in a way that wasn’t caused by anger or frustration is inconceivable, but Newt supposes that he does live in his own bubble most of the time, so he’s unlikely to have seen it happen if it did. He wonders if Hermann sings when he’s drunk, like his dad and his uncle do. He bets that it’s _adorable_. 

“Alcohol doesn’t really agree with me anyway.” Newt eventually mutters, and Hermann reaches slowly across the table and pats his hand in awkward conciliation. It’s such a sharp contrast to how confident he’s seemed all night, that Newt is flushed with the knowledge that Hermann is just as nervous about this date as he is, that he wants it to go well just as badly, and his own hand darts out to catch Hermann’s before he picks up his menu again. 

Hermann blushes lightly and squeezes, and it is as goddamn adorable as Newt thought it would be. 

The restaurant is playing Tchaikovsky’s ‘Little Russian’ over the speakers; and for once in Newt’s life, he just _relaxes_. 

*******************

Newt meets Vanessa entirely by luck. 

The first time she had visited the Shatterdome, Hermann had gone to great pains to keep them apart. But the second time just happens to fall on a day when one of the Jaeger’s has some kind of meltdown, and Hermann can’t get out of the emergency meeting for anything. Newt is awake and attempting to write a letter to his dad that doesn’t make him come across as ridiculously besotted. It’s been two weeks since Hermann first asked him to spend the night with him, and he hasn’t managed it yet. He can’t help the way that his feelings always seem to explode everywhere. He’s never been any good at keeping his excitement or his pain to himself.

He’s up with a shot when someone knocks on the door, and already making shushing noises before he answers it. Hermann has basically been working through three nights in a row trying to perfect his predictive model, and Newt only managed to make him crash by slowly replacing all the coffee in the jar in the lab with decaf. He’d practically had to drag him back to his bedroom, which had been difficult and painful when Hermann’s cane and bony elbows had gotten in his way, and Newt isn’t letting all his efforts go to waste. 

The techie on the other side of the door looks nervous, and he doesn’t brighten to see Newt rather than Hermann, which is frankly insulting. “Dr. Gottlieb is needed in the control room.” He says in a whisper. “Something is wrong with one of the Jaegar’s.” Newt nods in acknowledgement, and the techie turns to leave.

“Excuse me.” Newt calls to him, hushed. “Where do you think you’re going? I’m not waking him.” And he pushes passed the stunned man and hurries off down the hallway to his own room to sleep for a few extra hours. 

He sees Hermann next in the lab around midday; when he barges in, cane tapping irregularly and loudly in his haste. His hair is a little mussed, and his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. It’s the most undressed Newt has ever seen him outside of his own room, and he barely resists the urge to do something ridiculous like kiss him just to mess up his dumb haircut even more. The look on his face when he asks Newt to go to the airport to meet Vanessa is not exactly flattering, but when Hermann tells him that Newt is the only one he would trust to pick her up, he lights up inside. It washes over him so quickly and completely that he quite forgets to tell Hermann that he can’t actually drive. 

He takes a taxi instead. The airport is nearly deserted. People don’t fly much anymore. Most prefer to stay at home with their loved ones while the world is coming to an end. There’s only around 30 people on the flight, but Newt is sure that he would’ve noticed Vanessa in a crowd of thousands. She is shockingly gorgeous, and she stands tall and straight while everyone around her scuttles about, afraid. She reminds him of the Jaegar pilots. She reminds him of _Hermann_ , though what is his natural posture and what is his leg forcing him to keep it straight is up to debate.

She smiles at him when he introduces himself, and Newt doesn’t know how Hermann even talks to her. 

The taxi ride back to the Shatterdome is silent, the driver alternating between staring determinately ahead and looking back at Vanessa in the rearview mirror. It’s not exactly comfortable, but it’s not particularly uncomfortable either. Newt has a habit of letting every little thing in his life blow out to massive proportions, but Vanessa seems to be the type to let everything and anything roll off her back, and it’s easy to follow her lead. 

The driver turns up the radio and Newt recognises the song as something Hermann likes, and he finds himself singing along under his breath. Beside him Vanessa chuckles, and he looks at her curiously. “Hermann loves this song.” She says. “For our first date, he took me to a Rammstein concert. It was dreadful, but he had no idea what he was doing so I forgave him. It was just so good to see him excited about anything.”

Newt nearly chokes on his words in his rush to reply. “Tell me everything.”

By the time Hermann wanders into the lab again nearing ten at night, Newt and Vanessa have long since moved passed the subject of Hermann, and Newt is elbow deep in a Kaiju sample, trying to explain to her how the Kaiju can possibly be so big. He wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t obvious that she was brilliant, but her field is physics, not biology, and the Kaiju violate every law. 

Hermann is generally a quiet presence in a room when he’s not exploding with frustration, but when he swings open the door to the lab he’s babbling in a way that Newt can’t help but feel is his own. “The neural link has been talking to the Jaegars in a way that we never could have anticipated.” He says, and Newt freezes. “It has been mixing the pilot’s brainwaves into the machine in the same way it does for the people, and one of the Jaegars has been rewriting it’s own code. We had to put a stop to it, of course, because we can’t afford that kind of unpredictability now. But when this is all over, the advances we could make in AI are unprecedented.”

“Incredible.” Vanessa says, and Hermann looks around the room like he’s only just noticed that people are in it. He sees Newt with his hands in a Kaiju sample, Vanessa with her own gloves splattered with Kaiju blue, and he rolls his eyes in such a spectacularly childish way that Newt’s heart just about explodes with glee. “But also, I can’t believe you were hiding Newt here from me.” She continues. “He’s delightful.”

Hermann glares at her in what Newt is pretty sure is faux annoyance, and then swings his gaze over to him. The look in his eyes is so heavy with fondness and _relief_. 

Newt looses his concentration and his hand slips. He has to run to put his arm under the contamination shower. 

*******************

In the drift, Newt sees the Kaiju, the Precursors, in their cold, grey, dead land. He feels their power, their strength. Like he could tear down worlds with his hands alone. He feels their _rage_. It’s intoxicating, and their fury at the tiny, insignificant beings that defy them fills him almost to bursting. They should worship. They should cower. Their planet should be consumed by now, like so many planets before them. He feels like everyone is finally looking at him, finally giving him the respect and the awe he deserves. He feels–

He feels Hermann, all of four years old, staring longingly at his sister’s violin. Something precious, always kept out of his reach.

And just for a second, Newt is able to wrest enough control of the drift to linger on his memory of screeching through his own first violin lesson.

Hermann’s laughter bursts over the connection, and for a moment everything else is cast into shadow from the light of it.


End file.
